should feel it even if I wished to lay it in ruins. I doubt if Mr.
M'Cabe really thinks that Catholicism is dying, though he might deceive
himself into saying so. Nobody could be naturally moved to say that the
crowded cathedral of St. Patrick in New York was a ruin, or even that
the unfinished Anglo-Catholic cathedral at Washington was a ruin, though
it is not yet a church; or that there is anything lost or lingering
about the splendid and spirited Gothic churches springing up under the
inspiration of Mr. Cram of Boston. As a matter of feeling, as a matter
of fact, as a matter quite apart from theory or opinion, it is not in
the religious centres that we now have the feeling of something
beautiful but receding, of something loved but lost. It is exactly in
the spaces cleared and levelled by America for the large and sober
religion of the eighteenth century; it is where an old house in
Philadelphia contains an old picture of Franklin, or where the men of
Maryland raised above their city the first monument of Washington. It is
there that I feel like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted,
whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead, and all save he departed. It
is then that I feel as if I were the last Republican.
But when I say that the Republic of the Age of Reason is now a ruin, I
should rather say that at its best it is a ruin. At its worst it has
collapsed into a death-trap or is rotting like a dunghill. What is the
real Republic of our day as distinct from the ideal Republic of our
fathers, but a heap of corrupt capitalism crawling with worms; with
those parasites, the professional politicians? I was re-reading
Swinburne's bitter but not ignoble poem, 'Before a Crucifix,' in which
he bids Christ, or the ecclesiastical image of Christ, stand out of the
way of the onward march of a political idealism represented by United
Italy or the French Republic. I was struck by the strange and ironic
exactitude with which every taunt he flings at the degradation of the
old divine ideal would now fit the degradation of his own human ideal.
The time has already come when we can ask his Goddess of Liberty, as
represented by the actual Liberals, 'Have _you_ filled full men's
starved-out souls; have _you_ brought freedom on the earth?' For every
engine in which these old free-thinkers firmly and confidently trusted
has itself become an engine of oppression and even of class oppression.
Its free parliament has become an oligarchy. Its free press has become a
monopoly. If the pure Church has been corrupted in the course of two
thousand years, what about the pure Republic that has rotted into a
filthy plutocracy in less than a hundred?
O, hidden face of man, whereover
The years have woven a viewless veil,
If thou wert verily man's lover
What did thy love or blood avail?
Thy blood the priests make poison of;
And in gold shekels coin thy love.
Which has most to do with shekels to-day, the priests or the
politicians? Can we say in any special sense nowadays that clergymen, as
such, make a poison out of the blood of the martyrs? Can we say it in
anything like the real sense, in which we do say that yellow journalists
make a poison out of the blood of the soldiers?
But I understand how Swinburne felt when confronted by the image of the
carven Christ, and, perplexed by the contrast between its claims and its
consequences, he said his strange farewell to it, hastily indeed, but
not without regret, not even really without respect. I felt the same
myself when I looked for the last time on the Statue of Liberty.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] In the conclusion of this chapter I mean by the Republic
not merely the American Republic, but the whole modern representative
system, as in France or even in England.
_Is the Atlantic Narrowing?_
A certain kind of question is asked very earnestly in our time. Because
of a certain logical quality in it, connected with premises and data, it
is very difficult to answer. Thus people will ask what is the hidden
weakness in the Celtic race that makes them everywhere fail or fade
away; or how the Germans contrived to bring all their organisation into
a state of such perfect efficiency; and what was the significance of the
recent victory of Prussia. Or they will ask by what stages the modern
world has abandoned all belief in miracles; and the modern newspapers
ceased to print any news of murders. They will ask why English politics
are free from corruption; or by what mental and moral training certain
millionaires were enabled to succeed by sheer force of character; in
short, they will ask why plutocrats govern well and how it is that pigs
fly, spreading their pink pinions to the breeze or delighting us as they
twitter and flutter from tree to tree. The logical difficulty of
answering these questions is connected with an old story about Charles
the Second and a bowl of goldfish, and with another anecdote about a
gentleman who was asked, 'When did you leave off beating your wife?' But
there is something analogous to it in the present discussions about the
forces drawing England and America together. It seems as if the
reasoners hardly went far enough back in their argument, or took
trouble enough to disentangle their assumptions. They are still moving
with the momentum of the peculiar nineteenth-century notion of progress;
of certain very simple tendencies perpetually increasing and needing no
special analysis. It is so with the international _rapprochement_ I have
to consider here.
In other places I have ventured to express a doubt about whether nations
can be drawn together by an ancient rumour about races; by a sort of
prehistoric chit-chat or the gossip of the Stone Age. I have ventured
farther; and even expressed a doubt about whether they ought to be drawn
together, or rather dragged together, by the brute violence of the
engines of science and speed. But there is yet another horrible doubt
haunting my morbid mind, which it will be better for my constitution to
confess frankly. And that is the doubt about whether they are being
drawn together at all.
It has long been a conversational commonplace among the enlightened that
all countries are coming closer and closer to each other. It was a
conversational commonplace among the enlightened, somewhere about the
year 1913, that all wars were receding farther and farther into a
barbaric past. There is something about these sayings that seems simple
and familiar and entirely satisfactory when we say them; they are of
that consoling sort which we can say without any of the mental pain of
thinking what we are saying. But if we turn our attention from the
phrases we use to the facts that we talk about, we shall realise at
least that there are a good many facts on the other side and examples
pointing the other way. For instance, it does happen occasionally, from
time to time, that people talk about Ireland. He would be a very
hilarious humanitarian who should maintain that Ireland and England have
been more and more assimilated during the last hundred years. The very
name of Sinn Fein is an answer to it, and the very language in which
that phrase is spoken. Curran and Sheil would no more have dreamed of
uttering the watchword of 'Repeal' in Gaelic than of uttering it in
Zulu. Grattan could hardly have brought himself to believe that the real
repeal of the Union would actually be signed in London in the strange
script as remote as the snaky ornament of the Celtic crosses. It would
have seemed like Washington signing the Declaration of Independence in
the picture-writing of the Red Indians. Ireland has clearly grown away
from England; and her language, literature, and type of patriotism are
far less English than they were. On the other hand, no one will pretend
that the mass of modern Englishmen are much nearer to talking Gaelic or
decorating Celtic crosses. A hundred years ago it was perfectly natural
that Byron and Moore should walk down the street arm in arm. Even the
sight of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. W. B. Yeats walking down the street
arm in arm would now arouse some remark.
I could give any number of other examples of the same new estrangement
of nations. I could cite the obvious facts that Norway and Sweden parted
company not very long ago, that Austria and Hungary have again become
separate states. I could point to the mob of new nations that have
started up after the war; to the fact that the great empires are now
nearly all broken up; that the Russian Empire no longer directs Poland,
that the Austrian Empire no longer directs Bohemia, that the Turkish
Empire no longer directs Palestine. Sinn Fein is the separatism of the
Irish. Zionism is the separatism of the Jews. But there is one simple
and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least
equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference
between the Americans and the English.
Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of
literature. When I was a boy I read a book like _The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table_ exactly as I read another book like _The Book of
Snobs_. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.
Its wit and idiom were like those of the English literary tradition; and
its few touches of local colour seemed merely accidental, like those of
an Englishman who happened to be living in Switzerland or Sweden. My
father and my father's friends were rightly enthusiastic for the book;
so that it seemed to come to me by inheritance like _Gulliver's Travels_
or _Tristram Shandy_. Its language was as English as Ruskin, and a great
deal more English than Carlyle. Well, I have seen in later years an
almost equally wide and well-merited popularity of the stories of O.
Henry. But never for one moment could I or any one else reading them
forget that they were stories by an American about America. The very
first fact about them is that they are told with an American accent,
that is, in the unmistakable tones of a brilliant and fascinating
foreigner. And the same is true of every other recent work of which the
fame has managed to cross the Atlantic. We did not say that _The Spoon
River Anthology_ was a new book, but that it was a new book from
America. It was exactly as if a remarkable realistic novel was reported
from Russia or Italy. We were in no danger of confusing it with the
'Elegy in a Country Churchyard.' People in England who heard of Main
Street were not likely to identify it with a High Street; with the
principal thoroughfare in any little town in Berkshire or
Buckinghamshire. But when I was a boy I practically identified the
boarding-house of the Autocrat with any boarding-house I happened to
know in Brompton or Brighton. No doubt there were differences; but the
point is that the differences did not pierce the consciousness or prick
the illusion. I said to myself, 'People are like this in
boarding-houses,' not 'People are like this in Boston.'
This can be seen even in the simple matter of language, especially in
the sense of slang. Take, for instance, the delightful sketch in the
causerie of Oliver Wendell Holmes; the character of the young man called
John. He is the very modern type in every modern country who does
specialise in slang. He is the young fellow who is something in the
City; the everyday young man of the Gilbertian song, with a stick and a
pipe and a half-bred black-and-tan. In every country he is at once witty
and commonplace. In every country, therefore, he tends both to the
vivacity and the vulgarity of slang. But when he appeared in Holmes's
book, his language was not very different from what it would have been
in a Brighton instead of a Boston boarding-house; or, in short, if the
young man called John had more commonly been called 'Arry. If he had
appeared in a modern American book, his language would have been almost
literally unintelligible. At the least an Englishman would have had to
read some of the best sentences twice, as he sometimes has to read the
dizzy and involved metaphors of O. Henry. Nor is it an answer that this
depended on the personalities of the particular writers. A comparison
between the real journalism of the time of Holmes and the real
journalism of the time of Henry reveals the same thing. It is the
expansion of a slight difference of style into a luxuriant difference of
idiom; and the process continued indefinitely would certainly produce a
totally different language. After a few centuries the signatures of
American ambassadors would look as fantastic as Gaelic, and the very
name of the Republic be as strange as Sinn Fein.
It is true that there has been on the surface a certain amount of give
and take; or at least, as far as the English are concerned, of take
rather than give. But it is true that it was once all the other way; and
indeed the one thing is something like a just nemesis of the other.
Indeed, the story of the reversal is somewhat singular, when we come to
think of it. It began in a certain atmosphere and spirit of certain
well-meaning people who talked about the English-speaking race; and were
apparently indifferent to how the English was spoken, whether in the
accent of a Jamaican negro or a convict from Botany Bay. It was their
logical tendency to say that Dante was a Dago. It was their logical
punishment to say that Disraeli was an Englishman. Now there may have
been a period when this Anglo-American amalgamation included more or
less equal elements from England and America. It never included the
larger elements, or the more valuable elements of either. But, on the
whole, I think it true to say that it was not an allotment but an
interchange of parts; and that things first went all one way and then
all the other. People began by telling the Americans that they owed all
their past triumphs to England; which was false. They ended up by
telling the English that they would owe all their future triumphs to
America; which is if possible still more false. Because we chose to
forget that New York had been New Amsterdam, we are now in danger of
forgetting that London is not New York. Because we insisted that Chicago
was only a pious imitation of Chiswick, we may yet see Chiswick an
inferior imitation of Chicago. Our Anglo-Saxon historians attempted that
conquest in which Howe and Burgoyne had failed, and with infinitely less
justification on their side. They attempted the great crime of the
Anglicisation of America. They have called down the punishment of the
Americanisation of England. We must not murmur; but it is a heavy
punishment.
It may lift a little of its load, however, if we look at it more
closely; we shall then find that though it is very much on top of us, it
is only on top. In that sense such Americanisation as there is is very
superficial. For instance, there is a certain amount of American slang
picked up at random; it appears in certain pushing types of journalism
and drama. But we may easily dwell too much on this tragedy; of people
who have never spoken English beginning to speak American. I am far from
suggesting that American, like any other foreign language, may not
frequently contribute to the common culture of the world phrases for
which there is no substitute; there are French phrases so used in
England and English phrases in France. The word 'high-brow,' for
instance, is a real discovery and revelation, a new and necessary name
for something that walked nameless but enormous in the modern world, a
shaft of light and a stroke of lightning. That comes from America and
belongs to the world, as much as 'The Raven' or _The Scarlet Letter_ or
the novels of Henry James belong to the world. In fact, I can imagine
Henry James originating it in the throes of self-expression, and
bringing out a word like 'high-browed,' with a sort of gentle jerk, at
the end of searching sentences which groped sensitively until they found
the phrase. But most of the American slang that is borrowed seems to be
borrowed for no particular reason. It either has no point or the point
is lost by translation into another context and culture. It is either
something which does not need any grotesque and exaggerative
description, or of which there already exists a grotesque and
exaggerative description more native to our tongue and soil. For
instance, I cannot see that the strong and simple expression 'Now it is
for you to pull the police magistrate's nose' is in any way strengthened
by saying, 'Now it is up to you to pull the police magistrate's nose.'
When Tennyson says of the men of the Light Brigade 'Theirs but to do and
die,' the expression seems to me perfectly lucid. 'Up to them to do and
die' would alter the metre without especially clarifying the meaning.
This is an example of ordinary language being quite adequate; but there
is a further difficulty that even wild slang comes to sound like
ordinary language. Very often the English have already as humorous and
fanciful idiom of their own, only that through habit it has lost its
humour. When Keats wrote the line, 'What pipes and timbrels, what wild
ecstasy!' I am willing to believe that the American humorist would have
expressed the same sentiment by beginning the sentence with 'Some
pipe!' When that was first said, somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, it
was really funny; involving a powerful understatement and the suggestion
of a mere sample. If a spinster has informed us that she keeps a bird,
and we find it is an ostrich, there will be considerable point in the
Colorado satirist saying inquiringly, 'Some bird?' as if he were
offering us a small slice of a small plover. But if we go back to this
root and rationale of a joke, the English language already contains
quite as good a joke. It is not necessary to say, 'Some bird'; there is
a far finer irony in the old expression, 'Something like a bird.' It
suggests that the speaker sees something faintly and strangely birdlike
about a bird; that it remotely and almost irrationally reminds him of a
bird; and that there is about ostrich plumes a yard long something like
the faint and delicate traces of a feather. It has every quality of
imaginative irony, except that nobody even imagines it to be ironical.
All that happens is that people get tired of that turn of phrase, take
up a foreign phrase and get tired of that, without realising the point
of either. All that happens is that a number of weary people who used to
say, 'Something like a bird,' now say, 'Some bird,' with undiminished
weariness. But they might just as well use dull and decent English; for
in both cases they are only using jocular language without seeing the
joke.
There is indeed a considerable trade in the transplantation of these
American jokes to England just now. They generally pine and die in our
climate, or they are dead before their arrival; but we cannot be certain
that they were never alive. There is a sort of unending frieze or
scroll of decorative designs unrolled ceaselessly before the British
public, about a hen-pecked husband, which is indistinguishable to the
eye from an actual self-repeating pattern like that of the Greek Key,
but which is imported as if it were as precious and irreplaceable as the
Elgin Marbles. Advertisement and syndication make mountains out of the
most funny little mole-hills; but no doubt the mole-hills are
picturesque enough in their own landscape. In any case there is nothing
so national as humour; and many things, like many people, can be
humorous enough when they are at home. But these American jokes are
boomed as solemnly as American religions; and their supporters gravely
testify that they are funny, without seeing the fun of it for a moment.
This is partly perhaps the spirit of spontaneous institutionalism in
American democracy, breaking out in the wrong place. They make humour an
institution; and a man will be set to tell an anecdote as if to play the
violin. But when the story is told in America it really is amusing; and
when these jokes are reprinted in England they are often not even
intelligible. With all the stupidity of the millionaire and the
monopolist, the enterprising proprietor prints jokes in England which
are necessarily unintelligible to nearly every English person; jokes
referring to domestic and local conditions quite peculiar to America. I
saw one of these narrative caricatures the other day in which the whole
of the joke (what there was of it) turned on the astonishment of a
housewife at the absurd notion of not having an ice-box. It is perfectly
true that nearly every ordinary American housewife possesses an ice-box.
An ordinary English housewife would no more expect to possess an
ice-box than to possess an iceberg. And it would be about as sensible to
tow an iceberg to an English port all the way from the North Pole, as to
trail that one pale and frigid joke to Fleet Street all the way from the
New York papers. It is the same with a hundred other advertisements and
adaptations. I have already confessed that I took a considerable delight
in the dancing illuminations of Broadway--in Broadway. Everything there
is suitable to them, the vast interminable thoroughfare, the toppling
houses, the dizzy and restless spirit of the whole city. It is a city of
dissolving views, and one may almost say a city in everlasting
dissolution. But I do not especially admire a burning fragment of
Broadway stuck up opposite the old Georgian curve of Regent Street. I
would as soon express sympathy with the Republic of Switzerland by
erecting a small Alp, with imitation snow, in the middle of St. James's
Park.